VANITY FAIR

June 1915

ALEISTER CROWLEY:
MYSTIC AND MOUNTAIN CLIMBER

ALEISTER CROWLEY
From a sketch by Augustus John

All the Britons who are not fighting in the Great War seem
to be coming to New York this year. One of the most extraor-
dinary of our recent British visitors is Aleister Crowley, who is a
poet, an explorer, a mountain climber, an adept in mysticism
and magic, and an esoteric philosopher; in short a person of so
many sides and interests that it is no wonder a legend has been
built up around his name. He is a myth. No other man has had
so many strange tales told of him.
He is an Irishman, and was educated at Malvern and Trinity
College, Cambridge, as a preparation for the highly respectable
and sedate Diplomatic Service. But such a mission was not to
his taste. He soon found that he had no liking for the beaten
tracks in life. So he became an adept, a mystic, a wanderer
on the face of the earth.
The Equinox, his work on occultism is only a part of the
gigantic literary structure which he has built up in the past five
years, yet the work contains the stupendous number of two and
a half million words.
 Mr. Crowley has a habit of disappearing suddenly from
Paris, only to bob up again in Zapotlan, Tali Fu, Askole, Ham-
bantonia, or Ouled Djellal. To him a long journey is an
achievement, a satisfying thing in itself, like the hidden knowl-
edge which he is forever in search of. In 1900 he explored
Mexico without guides. Two years later he spent three months
in India at an altitude of 20,000 feet. In 1906, he crossed
China oh foot. The success of his magic-drams, The Rites of
Eleusis in 1910 in London, did not tempt him to settle down
there for long as he was next heard of in the heart of the Sa-
hara.
As a naked Yogi he has sat for days under the Indian sun,
begging his rice. Like every true magician he has experimented
with hundreds of strange poisons in order to discover the Elixir
of Life and the Elixir of Vision. He has devoted much time to
the art of materializing divine influences, which he does by the
aid of secret incenses; of invocations; and of rituals inherited
from the Gnostics and Rosicrucians. He once masqueraded
through a Cairo season as a mysterious Persian prince. He
shocked the orthodox by his book The Sword of Songwhich
was virtually an attack upon everything establishedbut soon
compelled to forgive him because of the religious fervor of his
next volumea book of devotional hymns. He holdslike all
good mysticsthat All thought, or speech, is false: Truth lies
in divine ecstasy beyond them.
He lives in Paris when not on his travels. One of his friends
is Augustus John, the painter, one of whose beautiful sketches
of Mr. Crowley we are privileged to print.